Finishing what you started is important.
-Adam Neumann
We live in strange times.
Can you imagine if, like, Paradise Lost had had a day-one patch rearranging all the lines into a different verse form? If the Last Supper had been put on display with just Christ in the centre and then had regular content updates adding in all the other disciples over the next couple of years?
What if The Dark Side of the Moon had had DLC tracks?
The point of all this is that it’s really rather strange living in a world that blurs the line between ‘finished product available to consumers’ and ‘work in progress’. For a while now we’ve had rereleases, definitive editions, new super-deluxe-with-special-introduction versions – in all kinds of media we’ve been releasing the same thing again with a bit of extra content or a slightly differently-edited ending or something, but we’re in an unprecedented age in which a work, even after it’s been put out there as a published text to be consumed and engaged with, can continue to be edited, altered, added to, replaced entirely. It’s weird. Roland Barthes would have had a field day with the advent of patches and update schedules.
Skelittle: A Giant Party is emblematic of this new era, I think. It’s in early access, as far as I can tell, which means it’s not quite a fully-released, fully-finished game just yet. (Or… it might have just left early access? Conflicting information available.)
Developers Bubble Studios, however, say that while the early access version is ‘a real game, already fun and well-polished’, they’re also planning to add new content every couple of weeks with a ‘major update’ each month. To their credit, they’re actively trying to involve players in this late stage of development in order to shape Skelittle into something that people will really enjoy, but I’m left with the strange quandary of having a game which the developers want me to see as a game already and in its own right but which I know is going to be vastly different pretty soon, and may not bear much resemblance to its current form by the time it’s un-early-access-ed. (Or indeed, if it’s already un-early-access-ed, then just take any point in the future of of its lifetime and it probably won’t be the same thing.)
How do we make sense of this? How do we review this?
Well, I think probably the only sensible thing I can do is to take Skelittle: A Giant Party as it is right now – the version I have, as of early December 2019 – and look at it as if its version history is frozen in time right now. By the time the game fully releases, it could be a wholly different beast, but… well, the task here is to look at what there is, not speculate about what there isn’t or what there might be.
With that said: let’s see what Skelittle: A Giant Party has to offer, shall we?
Gameplay: 4/10
As the name indicates, Skelittle: A Giant Party is a party game sort of in the vein of the Mario Party franchise.
I say ‘sort of’ because while it’s structured around playing rounds of minigames with up to three of your family and friends (that’s four total, number fans), that’s kind of all there is to it. It doesn’t have the overarching structural element of something like Mario Party’s board games, in which you’re playing a larger strategical game of which the minigames are a part; here you just pick a set of minigames, play ’em, see who wins the most, and that’s your game.
There is a hub of sorts to which you return between sets of minigames, and the developers of Skelittle actually seem to want you to think of this as its biggest and most unique draw. See, you’ll win various items in the course of playing the party games, and those items can then be positioned in your hub and combined in interesting ways to create your own games. (The hub, by the way, is called the Stash and takes the form of a toybox: the game’s narrative, such as it is, is that the player characters are Skelittles, toys who came to life and now just wanna have a good time. That’s all it needs, really.)
You could set up a couple of goals, some dice, a few jetpacks, and suddenly you’ve got some sort of weird flying sports RPG. Promotional material refers to this as ‘sandbox’ mode – it’s true enough that you can be pretty much free to create whatever zany shenanigans you like in this zone, but you only get a relatively small area in which to build and it can take a while to unlock enough things to play around with and make something interesting.
I think the minigames themselves are the bigger draw, although I can definitely see that some people (if you need to distract kids over the holidays, this’d probably work for a few hours) would probably have a blast arranging things in the sandbox and making up their own bizarre entertainment.
There are at present (future updates, as discussed, notwithstanding) fifteen minigames to play, each of which is an every-meeple-for-themselves sort of thing or, much more rarely, a team game. Either way, it’s about individually winning as many games as possible in order to finish the set with the most points. Each game has a unique stage and setting, putting the Skelittles in front of the dog’s kennel or in the water fountain or atop rolls of coins positioned around a toy helicopter.
The range of objectives, however, is frequently disappointing. Games come in one of two main varieties: survive the longest, or score the most points by completing a repetitive task as many times as possible within a time limit. There are a couple of exceptions, but you’ll fairly frequently find yourself feeling as if you’re playing the same minigame over again with a slightly different skin – and, since there are only fifteen minigames and they last perhaps a minute each, you’ll have seen everything Skelittle: A Giant Party has to offer before too long.
My favourite minigame is a jousting contest in which two teams of Skelittles face off: first they push their toy cars down the tracks at each other by mashing the Joy-Con shoulder buttons, then they complete a QTE (which they get longer to do if their car was going faster) in order to unseat the other player with their lance. It’s the most unusual of the bunch, gameplay-wise, so it feels refreshing to have a little joust between more generic escapades.
Multiplayer: 6/10
You can play Skelittle as a twosome, threesome, or foursome; there are four characters available to pick from, each with a different identifying colour and a sentence or so explaining their personalities. There’s no difference in gameplay, as far as I can tell, but I think that makes sense here: with the simplicity of the games, and how similar most of them are, it’d be hard to balance advantages and disadvantages in such a way that any of the four could be a viable choice.
Despite the relatively small pool of games to choose from, I actually did have a good time playing Skelittle with a friend. At its best, it’s just simple fun, allowing you to have a good competitive time without overcomplicating things. The short duration of each game, small selection of games, and lack of depth means that it’s only really good for half an hour or so of fun before you have to just do the same things again, though, and while there might be one or two you fancy going back to I don’t see it being something you’d want to immediately repeat.
Visuals: 5/10
Skelittle‘s not a bad-looking game: its simple graphics get the job done. You can easily tell who’s whom, which means it’s easy to just focus on the actual games without getting tied up in confusion about where you are or what you’re doing. Stages are all quite nicely put together, with a nice degree of attention to detail: the minigame that takes place on a desk with a toy helicopter features a packet of potato chips, assorted stationery, all sorts of things. (Something else that I appreciated about that stage is that each player stands on a pillar of coins: if you have fewer than the maximum four players, there aren’t any empty pillars. It’s a nice little detail that makes it feel as if some thought and effort has been put in, rather than simply leave the layout the same but with fewer people.)
I wouldn’t recommend playing in handheld mode – for one thing, given the multiplayer focus I don’t see why you would opt to have several people crowded round a small screen if you could avoid it, but the explanatory text telling you how to play each game is absolutely miniscule on the Switch’s screen. Plus the benefits of the whole ‘it’s nice and easy to tell what’s going on’ thing are somewhat offset by having less space to play with: Skelittle‘s been designed with a larger screen in mind, so that’s the experience I’d recommend.
Audio: 6/10
There are a few tracks on Skelittle‘s OST, and most of them aren’t half bad. Upbeat tunes enhance the mood, bringing a party vibe and building some excitement. I think the soundtrack always fit the mood of what was happening on the screen at the time, which might sound obvious but is one of the biggest plus points I can think of for a game’s OST.
As far as non-musical sounds go, sound effects generally feel pretty good – I didn’t notice any that were bad or drew my attention to themselves by not fitting – and there’s a leeeetle bit of voice acting in the form of some grunts and ‘oho’ noises from the Skelittles. It’s minimal, yet still somehow occasionally a bit too much; I think I might have actually preferred them to stay silent, although it might feel a bit strange and empty then.
Replayability: 4/10
I’ve played all of the minigames currently available in Skelittle maybe three times, and I think I’m done with it now. That said, it is a party game, and I can see myself busting it out again when there’s an opportunity for some quick multiplayer fun. I doubt I’d ever end up playing it more than twice with the same set of people, but it may well end up making a few appearances over the holiday season as different friends and relatives need to be entertained for half an hour.
Plus, as I mentioned earlier, I think the playtime potential may be much higher for those who find ‘the Stash’ fun: kids and those who like spending time making their own games will probably be able to make hours of fun rearranging objects to design new shenanigans.
Accessibility: 8/10
The simplicity of Skelittle means that pretty much anyone could play it, I reckon. You’ll only ever need to remember what a maximum of about three buttons do at a time, and it helpfully reminds you before every game (even ones you’ve seen before) what the specific rules and controls of that game are. I’m not convinced the explanations are always 100% clear, but it becomes obvious pretty quickly what you’re supposed to be doing.
From a visual accessibility perspective, I mentioned that the text is next to impossible to read in handheld mode, but I really don’t think that’s much of a problem given that it’s clearly not ideal for playing in handheld mode anyway. I did occasionally have a little bit of trouble reading text even on a larger screen due to the font and colour choices, but it’s not like you’re under any time pressure so it was always possible to decipher without too much of a problem.
Uniqueness: 3/10
It remains to be seen whether Skelittle: A Giant Party adds more features that set it apart from others like it in the near future, but for now I’d find it difficult to tell you its USP. The Stash is a nice function, letting you devise your own distractions, but it’s a fairly simple implementation; if you really want to make your own games-within-games, there are much better titles out there for you. Similarly, I’d recommend any of the Mario Party titles over Skelittle for their much-increased number, depth, and types of minigames. (Plus the board game aspect; I’m not saying Skelittle should have had a board game, and in fact I’d probably criticise it for trying to be too much like Mario Party if it had, but it does feel as if it’s missing some element to join the disparate and discrete minigames into a more cohesive whole experience.) Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a way to entertain a large group then something like a Jackbox Party Pack is probably going to be a better time.
Don’t get me wrong, by the way: I don’t hate Skelittle by any stretch of the imagination. I think that it’s fun enough for what it is, but when deciding what I feel like playing I tend to think about the unique things a game offers that I couldn’t get elsewhere, and Skelittle just doesn’t really have much of that.
My Personal Grade: 4/10
At its best, Skelittle is genuine, simple fun. Sometimes that’s all ya want.
When it’s at less than its best, though, it doesn’t feel quite polished enough: loading times are weirdly inconsistent but often quite long (strangely, things actually seemed to sometimes load faster in handheld mode), and I managed to softlock proceedings a few times by doing things that I thought were fairly reasonable things to be doing. Again, we’ll see whether Skelittle ends up being a better (or entirely different) game before too long; I think it’s got potential to offer a worthwhile party experience, but this feels like the bones of that experience. This might not seem like the greatest compliment, but while I don’t think I’m ready to like it just yet, I do think that if it builds on what it’s got and adds more unique content, it could quite happily stand next to other mainstays of the genre. To put it another way, there’s enough promise here that I’ll probably be checking back in with Skelittle as it updates to see what it becomes – that said, however, we’ve already covered that we can’t review a game that doesn’t exist or might eventually exist.
For now, I wouldn’t tell you not to play Skelittle: A Giant Party if you get a chance: if you’re hanging out with someone and they’re all like ‘hey, dude, I got this party game we could play’, then you should totally be like ‘yas, this sounds entertaining, let’s do that’. You’ll have a good time, if not an earth-shattering, life-changing artistic experience, but then that’s probably not what you’re really after in a party game.
Aggregated Score: 5.0
*The Well-Red Mage is grateful to developers Bubble Studios, publishers Plug In Digital, and Yohann Miniere for providing a copy of Skelittle: A Giant Party for the purposes of this review.
Though he’s been known by many names across the vast and peculiar landscape of the Internet, every iteration of The Sometimes Vaguely Philosophical Mage has shared an urge to look far too closely at tiny details and extrapolate huge, important-seeming conclusions. These days, in addition to Mage duties, he can be found discussing gaming and other pop culture (and occasionally sharing some of his own musical and fictional creations) at the Overthinker Y blog and on Twitter.
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